something in the way

The Guide to the App Galaxy, which we showed off last week at Google I/O, is designed to help mobile app developers—regardless of platform—navigate the complexities of launching an app and building a business on mobile. As you maneuver through the "galaxy” using the arrow keys on your keyboard, you’ll get the basics about app promotion, monetization and measurement—with tips from Google as well as successful developers.

There’s no exact blueprint for mobile app success and no developer’s journey is the same, which is why The Guide to the App Galaxy contains different advice and best practices from developers around the world. Here are some key insights from developers who have successfully built a business on mobile:

Rovio Mobile
Making money on mobile is not black and white—there's actually a lot of color. There are a number of business model options that aren't exclusive to any particular platforms.

Best, Cool & Fun Games
Offering your app for free lowers the barrier for users to download and try your app. The free version of Ant Smasher went viral because players could easily recommend the game to their friends through social media sites and word of mouth.

The Weather Channel
Don't forget to think beyond mobile. If you have a website or even a television channel, you can cross-promote your app with banner advertising or in-show mentions to drive downloads.

The Guide to the App Galaxy is currently available in English, Japanese, Korean, French and German. We’re continuing to expand the guide to other developers around the world with new languages and new content like case study journeys. For more information about our solutions for mobile app developers, visit www.guidetotheappgalaxy.com/about.

Posted by Lauren Usui, Product Marketing Manager

The Guide to the App Galaxy, which we showed off last week at Google I/O, is designed to help mobile app developers—regardless of platform—navigate the complexities of launching an app and building a business on mobile. As you maneuver through the "galaxy” using the arrow keys on your keyboard, you’ll get the basics about app promotion, monetization and measurement—with tips from Google as well as successful developers.

There’s no exact blueprint for mobile app success and no developer’s journey is the same, which is why The Guide to the App Galaxy contains different advice and best practices from developers around the world. Here are some key insights from developers who have successfully built a business on mobile:

Rovio Mobile
Making money on mobile is not black and white—there's actually a lot of color. There are a number of business model options that aren't exclusive to any particular platforms.

Best, Cool & Fun Games
Offering your app for free lowers the barrier for users to download and try your app. The free version of Ant Smasher went viral because players could easily recommend the game to their friends through social media sites and word of mouth.

The Weather Channel
Don't forget to think beyond mobile. If you have a website or even a television channel, you can cross-promote your app with banner advertising or in-show mentions to drive downloads.

The Guide to the App Galaxy is currently available in English, Japanese, Korean, French and German. We’re continuing to expand the guide to other developers around the world with new languages and new content like case study journeys. For more information about our solutions for mobile app developers, visit www.guidetotheappgalaxy.com/about.

Posted by Lauren Usui, Product Marketing Manager

We’ve seen tremendous growth in Android Market lately. With over 200,000 apps supporting over 300 Android devices, we’ve had 4.5 billion applications installed to date. But with so many apps available, how do you find the ones you really want? Whether you’re looking for the most popular apps, hot new apps, or just the very best apps available, we want to help make sure that you find what you’re looking for.

Today, we’re excited to announce 5 new features for Android Market focused on helping you find apps you’ll love.

• New top app charts - We’ve revamped our top app charts to be fresher and country-specific, so you get the most current, relevant results. We’ve also added top new free, top new paid, and top grossing lists, all right on the Android Market home page.   

• Editors’ Choice - These are some of the very best apps available for Android, as chosen by the Android Market staff. They span everything from games to productivity and beyond.   

• Top Developers - We’re also recognizing those developers creating the highest quality, most popular, and most notable apps available on Android Market. They’ll get a special icon on our Android Market website, appearing wherever the developer name is shown, starting today for an initial set of over 150 developers.

• Better related apps - On the left side of an app page, you’ll now see two groups of related apps: apps frequently browsed by people who viewed this app, and apps that people tend to install alongside this app. For example, people who view ScoreMobile, my favorite sports score app, often also view other sports score apps, while those who install ScoreMobile tend to also install apps for specific sports leagues or teams. We’ll also show you related apps once you decide to install an app.

• Trending apps - Finally, we’ve added a new section to the Android Market homepage showing trending apps – those apps that are quickly growing in daily installs. Look here to stay ahead of the curve and find new apps as they get hot.

We hope you find these features helpful as you explore the many greats apps available on Android Market. These new features are available now on http://market.android.com, and will be coming soon to Android Market on phones and tablets.

Posted by Fernando Delgado, Product Manager, Android Market

This week I sent a note to Googlers about some of the Chrome team's favorite extensions. So many of them asked if they could share the list with people outside the company that I thought I would just do it for them. Here it is. We're proud of the Chrome browser and the great extensions that its developer community has created, and we hope you enjoy them! They can all be found at chrome.google.com/extensions.

• Opinion Cloud: Summarizes comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos to provide an overview of the crowd’s overall opinion.
• Google Voice: All sorts of helpful Voice features directly from the browser. See how many messages you have, initiate calls and texts, or call numbers on a site by clicking on them.
• AutoPager. Automatically loads the next page of a site. You can just scroll down instead of having to click to the next page.
  
• Turn Off the Lights: Fades the page to improve the video-watching experience.
• Google Dictionary: Double-click any word to see its definition, or click on the icon in the address bar to look up any word.
• After the Deadline: Checks spelling, style, and grammar on your emails, blog, tweets, etc.
• Invisible Hand: Does a quick price check and lets you know if the product you are looking at is available at a lower price elsewhere.
• Secbrowsing: Checks that your plug-ins (e.g. Java, Flash) are up to date.
• Tineye: Image search utility to find exact matches (including cropped, edited, or re-sized images).
• Slideshow: Turns photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Google Images into slideshows.
• Google Docs/PDF Viewer: Automatically previews pdfs, powerpoint presentations, and other documents in Google Docs Viewer.
• Readability: Reformat the page into a single column of text.
• Chromed Bird: A nice Twitter viewing extension.
• Feedsquares: Cool way of viewing your feeds via Google Reader.
• ScribeFire: Full-featured blog editor that lets you easily post to any of your blogs.
• Note Anywhere: Digital post-it notes that can be pasted and saved on any webpage.
• Instant Messaging Notifier: IM on multiple clients.
• Remember the Milk: The popular to-do app.
• Extension.fm: Turns the web into a music library.

Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

For many people, their mobile phone—and access to the Internet—is always within reach. App Inventor for Android gives everyone, regardless of programming experience, the opportunity to control and reshape their communication experience. We’ve observed people take pride in becoming creators of mobile technology and not just consumers of it.

For the past year, we’ve been testing App Inventor in classrooms around the United States, and we’ve found that it opens up the world of computer programming to students in new and powerful ways. David Wolber, professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco and part of the initial pilot program, says “students traditionally intimidated by technology are motivated and excited to program with App Inventor.” One student from Professor Wolber’s class told us: “I used to think that no one could program except CS people. Now, I've made dozens of applications for the Android phone!” Another student, who struggles with dyslexia, was inspired by App Inventor to take more computer science classes and is now learning Python. Check out this video to hear more about App Inventor for Android at University of San Francisco.

Visit our site to learn more about App Inventor and see sample apps. To request an invitation, fill out this form and you’ll soon be on your way to building mobile applications. And check out the video below to see how it works. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Posted by Mark Friedman, Google Engineer

It’s a fact that mobile is one of the big trends for technology and lifestyle for 2010 – specially due to the rise of applications via iPhone and the subsequent follow up done by competitors to engage their audiences on their mobile devices. The Mobile Phone is becoming less a phone and more an application desk that connects the users with the world around them. This means that the whole choice process for the purchase of the new mobile phone has new key variant – application viability and potential. True, every year there has been some buzz regarding the mobile technology and how it will impact society sooner or later. So it is natural that the demand for professional mobile developers is rising – and ad agencies all over are up for the run.

With this in mind, we have come to the attention of the launch an interesting platform – TheyMakeApps – in which you can find a portfolio of the best App makers you can find close to you (or not!).

While being a simple idea, TheyMakeApps is quite ingenious. Most agencies have been up to their hairs in finding ways to answer to the client’s demands regarding mobile applications for their brands (and as part of our Big Bet for 2010, the demand is only sure to rise) so the agencies can have one of two solutions – either develop the know-how inside the company by hiring professional App Developers or by hiring App Developers per job. In any case, where do you find someone with such specific skills for something as important nowadays as mobile applications? TheyMakeApps solves the problem by providing a directory of App Developers by Geographic localization and even price range. You search for the App Maker of your liking, check his portfolio and contact him – all in the same website.

For now the big focus of TheyMakeApps is the IPhone – which is the granddaddy of Mobile Applications, thus has the biggest Programmer Base. But it’s looking for the opportunity to spread to other Platforms like the Blackberry, Android or Palm that, while a little more difficult to enter at this moment, are very relevant on the global mobile business. But one thing is for sure – this is another strong indicator on the strength of mobile applications today and how the App Making skill’s importance is growing. So if you are an App Maker or know someone who is, make sure you direct them to TheyMakeApps – I’m sure they’ll thank you.

We've blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we've taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online, the social web has exploded as the primary way to share interesting stuff, tell the world what you're up to in real-time and stay more connected to more people. In today's world of status messages, tweets and update streams, it's increasingly tough to sort through it all, much less engage in meaningful conversations.

Our belief is that organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise — has become a large-scale challenge, one that Google's experience in organizing information can help solve. We've recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we're taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

We're rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don't see it in your account yet, check back soon. We also plan to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.

On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a small screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add an important component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint an extremely rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more info about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.

We've relied on other services' openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We're building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.

We really hope you enjoy the experiences we've built within Gmail and for mobile phones. If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com. We look forward to continuing to evolve and improve Google Buzz based on your feedback.

First there were rumors about Apple using bing as their official search provider. Then there was the rant by Steve Job’s calling Google motto bs. Then Google struck back adding multi touch to the Nexus One, now this.

An iPhone developer has received a letter from Apple stating that it can not use the word “Android” in their app. In fact Apple wants to remove that word from all its apps in the app store. Idiot moves like this is the prime reason more and more people are choosing Android and this will only lead to the demise of the iPhone. Nobody wants to be under a dictatorship and that is what Apple has been. Here is a copy of the letter.

“Dear Flash of Genius, LLC,
Thank you for submitting Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab 2.2 to the App Store. During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections.
Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store. While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate to remove “Finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge!” from the Application Description.
Please log into iTunes Connect to make appropriate changes to the Application Description now to avoid an interruption in the availability of Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab 2.2 on the iPhone App Store.
Regards,
iPhone Developer Program”

[via eurodroid]

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• Android vs iPhone: Slug It Out
• Top Android dev says Android Market sales are not good
• Michael Dell Shows Off The Upcoming Dell Mini 5

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We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of "beta" software as not being yet ready for prime time.

Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it's had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase. So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we'll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there's a small "beta" beneath the logo. Indeed, today we're also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.

We have much more in store, and IT managers can read more about how to make the switch to Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers. One more thing — for those who still like the look of "beta", we've made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise

Since the launch of Google Apps Education Edition in October 2006, millions of people at thousands of schools in more than 100 countries have been using our free email and collaboration tools. We love hearing from newly deployed schools like Loyola Marymount University, Westmont College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, Chapman University, Saint Ignatius High School, and California State University, Chico (to name a few) about how they're now able to use Apps in teaching, learning, and researching on campus, while also saving time and money.

While we continue to see more and more U.S. schools moving to Google Apps, we find it especially exciting to see that the trend of outsourcing online communication and collaboration needs is catching on in other parts of the world. In Australia, for example, the New South Wales Department of Education recently migrated 1.5 million students to Google Apps. The University of Adelaide also just announced that it is offering to its 16,000 students email services and other online tools as part of the Apps suite, at no cost to the university. Many other schools and colleges in this region have also recently deployed Google Apps, including Hsin Sheng College of Medical Care and Management in Taoyuan County Taiwan, Air University in Islamabad Pakistan, Univesitas Pelita Harapan in Indonesia, the International College of Management in Sydney, and schools across New Zealand like Fendalton School.

To help spread the word about Apps, the team in India came up with the Got the "App"titude Challenge, which encouraged students, faculty members and alumni from all engineering and management schools throughout India to move their institutions to Google Apps. The challenge created quite a stir, and after launching in August, we received almost 6,000 sign-ups. Each college team consisted of students, alumni and faculty who worked closely with IT staff to identify challenges in their existing email and collaboration solutions. Working with a Googler, the teams then demonstrated ways Google Apps could be used to address these challenges. The performance of each team was evaluated by measuring product usage after their deployment.

We'd like to extend our congratulations to the XL CONNECT team from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, who won the challenge by demonstrating the highest usage of Google Apps products.

As a result of the challenge, more than 100 colleges across India are now in the process of implementing Apps in their institutions. And we look forward to seeing more and more schools all over the world adopt Google Apps.

Posted by Amarpreet Singh, Online Sales and Operations Manager, and Andrew Mitchell, Senior Strategist